Dirt. Everywhere.

Mars Attacks!

The science fiction community has been some of Mars’ greatest fans, but what was science fiction back in the day is now slowly becoming reality due to the extraordinary effort and imagination of select people. There is something about Mars being a planet, and not just another moon, that gives it some personality and intrigue. It has a lot to offer our population here on Earth, like; natural resources, a brand new land to discover, hope for a new colony and it is just all around bleakly weird enough to see what the hell is going on there.

One name that pops out to me when researching Mars and our history with it is Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun, yeah you read that right. He is an incredible man that deserves all the attention that he gets. To get straight to the point, he knew how to build rockets. He was a rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect and overall badass that came to America from Germany to help our military’s rocket program, but was soon assimilated into NASA’s rocket detail when they found out how much he knew. His first thoughts on Mars were about colonizing and were incredibly ambitious. He wanted to have “a fleet of ten spacecrafts (each with a mass of 3,720 metric tons), three of them unmanned and each carrying one 200-ton winged lander in addition to cargo, and nine crew vehicles transporting a total of 70 astronauts” go to Mars. 70 astronauts going to Mars! He also wrote a science fiction novel about colonizing Mars while working on the Mars details. He scaled his plans down quite a bit later on, but these plans being birthed in the 50’s, bowed down to moon plans that came on its heels and took priority. He is the man that oversaw the production of the rocket that took men to the moon, so you can’t blame him for really anything.